Nature may be our most qualified life coach, with millions of years of experience in creating sustainability. It's time to look to Her wisdom for some answers. It's time to do something different; the evolution occurs when we try smarter - not harder!

ZEN teaches the insight of the Buddha, that meditation brings an end to suffering. As esoteric as this may sound, it's an empirical fact. Ordinary people meditate and find their experience—their entire world—transformed. The poetry of their language is not myth, but an effort to do justice to their experience. When you taste the deep clear intelligence at the heart of being, nothing is left untouched.

Consciousness may be an emergent phenomenonthat showed up 12 billion years after the first Big Bang. Yet, an even more striking possibility is that proto-consciousness came into being along with other basic cosmic constituents shortly after the Big Bang occurred.

Consciousness would then not be an accidental “add on” that never quite fits in a material universe, but instead would be a primary feature of the universe that occurs at all levels of reality, right down to that of quarks.

The world is in crisis and transformation. Now, our civilization has the opportunity to evolve it's thinking. We are beginning to realize that the old ways of competition and "survival of the fittest" are not sustainable, for individuals, businesses, or the planet. Nature may be our most qualified life coach, with millions of years of experience in creating sustainability.

It's time to look to Her wisdom for some answers. It's time to do something different!

Whenever I explain what evolution is, I say simply this: Evolution is a cosmic process that is going somewhere in and through time. And we are all part of that process. This simple fact is potentially life-transforming, but it's also hard to grasp at a deep level. The process that created us is moving. We tend to see the world around us as static. But it's not. It's going somewhere. We're going somewhere. Awakening to this truth about all of manifestation changes the way we see the world around us and our place in it. The biggest and most important part of this awakening is that we discover our power to affect where the process that created us is going. We realize the ultimate reason for our own existence: to be a spiritual hero, to boldly take responsibility for the future of the process itself.

What have become so important, as we have started to create an East-West integration, are the relative aspects of consciousness. And these relative aspects have to do with how you interpret that absolute experience of consciousness. What are the different ways of interpreting spiritual experience? For this we find that there are developmental components, or stages, associated with the types of shared values that we have as cultures and with the types of values and worldviews that we hold as individuals as well.

One of the easiest ways to understand these shared interpretations is through the names that were given to them by Jean Gebser, who was a real pioneer in the mid twentieth century in looking at the evolution of these relative structures of consciousness. He called the stages archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral, and higher. So you can have a full-blown satori, or consciousness experience, but depending on where you are in this developmental scale, you’ll interpret it according to different values.

You can interpret it in a magical, or egocentric, fashion: “I and I alone have this pure consciousness.” You can interpret it in a mythic, or traditional, value structure, which is the next major stage, and believe that this experience is given just to one group, one people, or one chosen tribe. You can experience it in a modern, or rational, fashion. You can experience it in a pluralistic, or postmodern, fashion. And you can experience it in an integral, or post-postmodern, fashion. These are all relative aspects of consciousness. And what you and I are particularly looking at is the importance of a full enlightenment being an experience of both absolute and relative consciousness.

To many, it is simply a compelling philosophy, uniting the revelations of science and spirituality in a way that no other theory can. But others, like Aurobindo before them, are beginning to reach beyond a theoretical discussion to wonder: What might human life and culture look like if we fully took to heart the reality of this view?

Freed from the mythic dogmatisms of premodern religion, transcending the materialistic biases of modern scientific thought, and liberated from the narcissistic self-absorptions of postmodernity, what kind of new world could human beings aligned with the trajectory of a spiritually evolving cosmos actually create?

I am part of the world. The world is not outside of me, and I am not outside of the world. The world is in me, and I am in the world.

I am part of nature, and nature is part of me. I am what I am in my communication and communion with all living things. I am an irreducible and coherent whole with the web of life on the planet.

I am part of society, and society is part of me. I am what I am in my communication and communion with my fellow humans. I am an irreducible and coherent whole with the community of humans on the planet.

I am more than a skin-and-bone material organism: mybody, and its cells and organs are manifestations of what is truly me: a self-sustaining, self-evolving dynamic system arising, persisting and developing in interaction with everything around me.

I am one of the highest, most evolved manifestations of the drive toward coherence and wholeness in the universe. All systems drive toward coherence and wholeness in interaction with all other systems, and my essence is this cosmic drive. It is the same essence, the same spirit that is inherent in all the things that arise and evolve in nature, whether on this planet or elsewhere in the infinite reaches of space and time.

There are no absolute boundaries and divisions in this world, only transition points where one set of relations yields prevalence to another. In me, in this self-maintaining and self-evolving coherence- and wholeness-oriented system, the relations that integrate the cells and organs of my body are prevalent. Beyond my body other relations gain prevalence: those that drive toward coherence and wholeness in society and in nature.

The separate identity I attach to other humans and other things is but a convenient convention that facilitates my interaction with them. My family and my community are just as much “me” as the organs of my body. My body and mind, my family and my community are interacting and interpenetrating variously prevalent elements in the network of relations that encompasses all things in nature and the human world ...